Obscure
by Let's Shawarma
Summary: Savannah Oswald made a mistake. Now S.H.I.E.L.D. wants her to join an elite group to fight a new enemy. However, she lacks both the skills and the confidence needed to take on the threat. To her team, she's a weakness. To herself, she's a coward. To Steve, she's got so much more to offer. Can the super soldier help her charge into battle? EDITING IN PROGRESS
1. Prologue

**Hello, hello, hello, attractive readers! I hope you enjoy this chapter/prologue. I've spent a lot of time on it and I love it, so I hope you do, too! Unfortunately, I doubt all my chapters will be this long. I just love a good introduction. But enough talk. Read away!**

* * *

_Auditions for the Performing Arts Centre's summer musical, Anything Goes, are now underway. 3:15-6pm. All are welcome._

No matter how many times she read and reread the sign taped on the doors of the auditorium, Savannah felt anything but welcome. A constant stream of people made its way through the opposite door; teens and adults who were excitedly chattering about which part they would get or who would make the cut pushed past her while she remained to the side. Savannah grabbed the sleeve of her blue sweatshirt and began to play with its worn cuff. The sweatshirt's color was comforting to her; a soft, grayish blue not unlike the sky outside, whose clouds hung heavily and threatened rain the next day. Its fabric was soft and warm, giving her a well-needed sense of security.  
Savannah felt out of place. She was not the public speaking (let alone _singing_) type of person. She took solace in her books, the internet, and food, not show tunes and Shakespeare. Her tanned hands left her sleeve to run through her dark brown hair. She wasn't here for the thrill of a show. She came solely to fulfill a promise made to a friend. The brunette pondered on the conversation that had led her here. The words "anti-social" and "pathetic" were thrown at her quite frequently, but when her best friend pointed out that she needed to "come out of her shell already" and "participate in life for once," she knew she was right. So, auditioning for a musical seemed like the right way to go about changing herself.

-At the time.

Savannah found herself standing outside ten, twenty, thirty minutes after the auditions had started. Her feet refused to budge. She struggled with the prospect of being in front of twenty to sixty total strangers. She took a deep breath to calm her shaking form.

_Okay, on the count of 3, you're going in there. __1... 2... 3..._  
_-Oh look, a distraction._

She bent down to tie her shoe, knowing the laces were secure but still untying, single, double, and triple knotting them. She side-shuffled on one knee to let a group of people in through the second door, which she was blocking, avoiding eye contact. She then stood up, her hand grasping the door handle until her knuckles turned white.  
_Alright. Now you're going to go in there, audition, then get the heck out of Dodge. You can do this, Oswald. 3... 2... 1..._  
_-But first I need a drink of water._

She kicked herself mentally for her cowardice as she walked over to the water fountains. She wasn't cut out for this. She had never even presented a project or a drawing in elementary school, always calling in sick the day of And now she expected herself to put her lack of talent on display in front of at least sixty people? To hell with her promise.

_This is ridiculous. I'm going home._

Savannah turned to walk towards the exit, nearly tasting her freedom as she approached the white metal doors, when suddenly-

"Savannah! Savannah Oswald!"

Savannah cringed. _So close..._  
A pretty brunette ran up to greet her. She had the same olive skin tone and dark hair color as Savannah, but instead of long, wavy hair, had a short pixie cut, and confidence radiated off her gorgeous form. Savannah radiated nothing but fear.

"H-h-h-h-hey Amb-ber," she managed to stammer out. And there it was, the main reason she hated being in public: she had a horrible stuttering problem. She could handle most words when she was alone or with friends, but it grew worse when she was nervous. She could trip over any syllable when she was on edge.

"Hello, girlie. Care to explain why you're going that way?"

Savannah looked behind her through the glass. So much freedom lay beyond those two metal frames...  
She looked back at Amber, whose arms were crossed as she awaited her answer. She stuck her chin out and responded, "I'm n-n-not going."

Amber smiled, not in understanding, but in a way that made Savannah feel inferior and powerless. Savannah knew her friend was preparing to get her way.

"Honey, please. Let's go." Amber clamped a perfectly manicured hand around Savannah's arm and began to pull her to the auditorium.

"A-A-Amber, p-please, I-I don't want t-to go. I-I-I t-thought ab-b-b-bout it and I-I-I'm n-not-"

"Don't be silly, Savannah, you'll be fine." Amber continued to pull her friend along until they reached the stage.

"Ms. Brown, Ms. Oswald, I hope you realize that we do not tolerate excessive tardiness in the theatre business. Punctuality is key," the director, a short, older woman with thick-framed glasses, scolded from her seat.

"Yes ma'am, won't happen again," Amber said as she pushed her companion up the stairs. Savannah was pushed to the pianist, then given a thumbs up from her captor as she settled into the audience.

"Yes, and what will you be singing for us today?" The director asked as she pulled out an evaluation sheet.

"I-I-I-"

"Oh, who let the dweeb in?" _Oh no._

"Nobody told me the B-B-B-Broken R-R-Record was allowed to audition!" Laughs and jeers came from the audience. Savannah recognized the three girls in the front row as the bullies from school. If she had known _they_ would be here, she wouldn't have thought twice about saying "no". Gripping her sleeve once more, she whispered the title of her song to the boy behind the piano, who nodded and gave her a brief look of pity when she turned away.  
Savannah took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Maybe if she just sang, she wouldn't feel so afraid.

"T-T-Times h-h-h-have c-c-c-c-changed, and w-w-w-we've oft-ten rewound t-the c-clock..." This was a disaster. Savannah continued to stammer and trip over every syllable, making her peers laugh harder. The pianist tried to slow his music down for her, but even then, she still sounded horrible.

_I wish I was invisible, _she thought to herself. _I wish I wasn't here, I wish I had never made that promise, I wish nobody could see me-_

Somebody screamed.

Savannah's eyes flew open. What had happened? More and more screams rose from the house, everyone looking at her with fear.

"W-w-w-what?" She looked down. Was there a spider on her chest or something?

No. Her chest was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the rest of her body from the neck down.

Savannah had turned herself invisible.

_No! Not here! Not now! I didn't mean it!_

So she ran. Savannah Oswald, a floating head stammering out swears, ran from the auditorium. This was a disaster. Nobody was supposed to know about her power. This had never just... happened before. Normally she was in control of her invisibility. She had never turned unless someone wasn't looking at her.

Savannah ran and ran, her legs powered by fear. She didn't know if it had been mere minutes or hours since she had started, all she knew was that she had to get away. She kept running until the sky was dark and rain began to fall. She looked around and realized she was completely lost.

So she cried. She pulled her blue hood over her head and began to walk down the street, the exhaustion finally taking its toll on her tired limbs. She walked until she reached an alleyway. Not the safest of places to camp out, but it would have to do until the morning. Savannah curled up in a corner, chest heaving and face stick with rain, sweat, and tears, and closed her eyes. She knew she couldn't go back. Not after that incident. Even if she had to live in this alley for the rest of her life, she could never go back.

_At least I know nobody will miss me._


	2. Call to Arms

**Greetings and salutations once again, lovely readers! I am back with a second chapter. Shocking, I know. I really hope I'm doing alright. I haven't written anything in a long time, so this story is really going to show that my skills are a bit rusty. Thank you so much for such kind feedback; no lie, I squeal, jump, and thank God for the beautiful reader who reviewed or favorited or added me to their alerts. It makes me so happy. **

**AvengersGirl-LokisSpy: Thank you, lovely! I hope I won't let you down with this chapter :)**

**Ali (Guest): I'm sorry it's so sad, but things get better! I promise! **

**L. L. Pottle: Wowowowowow I love you already just for saying that. Thanks, beautiful! I really hope I won't let you down with this.**

**Thanks to TheMostRandomOfRandomWriters , JackSparrowsWench92, Pein's Kid, Lorelee13, Saphem, DarkestInk, and L. for following/favoriting this story! I love you all :)**

**Anywhoo, in this chapter we'll finally meet our favorite one-eyed Director, as well as our star-spangled man with a plan. Enjoy chapter 2!**

**EDIT: SO SORRY I HAD TO DELETE THE CHAPTER BUT IT'S BACK NOW YAY**

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Steve stood alone in the gym, taking everything he had out on the punching bag in front of him. The sounds of his fists making impact resonated off the dimly-lit walls.

_Bucky. Peggy. Erskine. HYDRA. _A punch for every painful thought, and then some.

Memories plagued his mind every waking hour. Thoughts of the friends and men he'd lost tortured him throughout the day, and nothing but Peggy ran through his head at night. The doctors told him he had PTSD. They'd told him this was normal for veterans, that the memories would end. But they didn't. He doubted they ever would. Day after day he went through this. Nobody understood how hard it was to adapt. To function. To live.

Another volley of punches befell the bag.

"The Man Out of Time," they called him. 70 years ago he had crashed that damned plane in the ice. 70 years. It amazed him how much things had changed. Everything was bigger. Brighter. More complicated.

_Foreign._

The bag flew from its chain with a final blow.

Steve heaved a breath of fatigue. He wasn't tired from his exercise, not in the least. He reached down and grabbed another bag, lifting it and mounting it on the hook with ease. No, he wasn't tired physically. He was tired emotionally and mentally.

_"Chin up, soldier."_

_Bucky. Peggy. Erskine. HYDRA._

A punch for every memory, and then some.

"Trouble sleeping?"

Steve stopped his punching to face his visitor: Director Nick Fury.

"I slept for seventy years, sir." Steve continued to pummel the bag in front of him. "I think I've had my fill."

"Then you should be out, celebrating," the Director replied, now approaching the blonde. "Seeing the world."

Steve ceased his beating. That was enough for one night, anyway. "I went under, the world was at war. I come back, they say we won." The captain unwrapped his bandages, his mind drifting to the files he had left on his table that morning; records of his comrades, "deceased" stamped on most of their yellowed pages. "But they didn't say what we lost."

Fury now stood in front of Steve. "We've made some mistakes along the way; some very recently," the director admitted.

Steve stared skeptically. Surely there was a reason for Fury's visit. "You here with a mission, sir?"

"I am."

Steve continued to pack his bag, feeling like he knew what was coming next. "Trying to get me back into the world?"

"Trying to save it." Fury handed him a folder. In it was finally, and unfortunately, information on something familiar. _The Tesseract._

"HYDRA's secret weapon," Steve said bitterly.

"Howard Stark fished that out of the ocean when he was looking for you. He thought what we think: the Tesseract could be the key to unlimited sustainable energy. That's something the world sorely needs."

Steve closed the file and handed it to Fury. That cosmic cube had been the cause of so much controversy 40 years ago. He wasn't surprised the same thing had happened now. "Who took it from you?"

"He's called 'Loki'. He's... not from around here. There's a lot more I have to bring you up to speed on, if you're in. The world has gotten a lot stranger than you already know."

"At this point, I doubt anything would surprise me," Steve said as he stood up to leave.

"Ten bucks says you're wrong," Fury called after him. "There's a debriefing packet waiting for you back at your apartment." _Great, more papers._"Is there anything you know about the Tesseract that we ought to know now?"

Steve felt especially angry just at the sound of that damned cube's name. "You should've left it in the ocean."

* * *

Nick Fury returned outside. A man dressed in a similarly styled suit fell in line with him. "Do we have the Captain, sir?"

"He'll come around eventually, Agent Kingston." The two men approached their car. "They all do in the end."

Kingston opened the door for his superior, then hurried to get to the other side while motioning for the driver to depart. "Pardon me if this is a bit forward, sir, but I-"

"If you have to ask, Kingston, then it probably is," Fury interrupted. "But proceed."

Agent Kingston, taken aback, started again. "Sir, I just have to ask: I know that Agents Barton and Romanoff are two of the best assassins in the world, the Captain is _the _soldier, the doctor's a killing machine, we've got an alien _god_, for Christ's sake, and Stark's suit is built for a job like this-"

"Get to the point, Kingston."

"I just don't see why we need this seventh addition. This... girl. From what I read in her file, all she can do is disappear. I don't see how she can help this team reap any benefit based on what she can do. In short, she seems like a waste of time."

Fury shifted in his seat, now facing the agent next to him. "I have my reasons for recruiting that girl, reasons I don't believe you're entitled to know. Now shut the hell up until we get back to base." Kingston nodded, trembling slightly. He wasn't called "Fury" for nothing.

In truth, Fury had recruited that "girl" for one reason and one reason alone: he had a hunch. He had seen powers like hers in one other woman, Susan Storm. If this "Savannah" could do what she did, then the team he was conducting would be in good hands. But it was only a hunch.

Nick Fury was a desperate man.

* * *

Savannah's head felt fuzzy. She tried to open her eyes, immediately regretting the decision as the sun nearly blinded her. Her entire body was sore; her arms and legs were like lead, and she felt a faint trace of an electrical tingle lingering in the back of her neck. She tried to stand up, eyes still closed, but her efforts were halted by some sort of harness. Savannah cracked one eye open. A seatbelt was strapped across her chest, limiting her mobility.

_Where the hell am I?_

She opened both eyes, ignoring the stinging discomfort from the sudden light. She definately wasn't in the alleyway anymore. She was on what seemed to be a small jet. Two strange men sat across from her, talking. Her hands tore at the belt, struggling to get free. Her breath became shallow as she felt like throwing up, while her head was spinning. This wasn't good. She needed to get out of here. She was thousands of miles above ground, but she needed to escape.

A pair of hands suddenly ceased her efforts.

"It's alright, ma'am. You're safe now."

Savannah looked up and met a pair of brilliant blue eyes staring into her hazel ones with kindness and concern. His hands were large and warm, and swallowed her own, which were still holding the seat belt in a death grip. He slowly worked her fingers off the belt and unbuckled it for her, his eyes never leaving her. Savannah curled up her seat. This stranger was huge, standing over six feet tall with a chisled physique to match. He looked like he could kill her with just one blow, and yet he seemed... nice.

Not nice enought to trust, but nice.

"W-w-w-who a-are y-y-you people? W-w-w-where am I-I-I?" Savannah stammered in fear. The man who had helped her reached for her hands again, but she snatched them away, stood up and moved to the back of the plane. The man moved to approach her.

"Ma'am, if you could please just calm down-"

The blonde man was pushed back by an invisible force. He tried again to approach her, but was pushed back by the same force. Savannah held her hands out as if to attack again. Before the man could move towards her once more, she turned invisible and retreated to the front of the plane. She hid in one of the seats.

"Coulson, you didn't tell me she could do... well, _that."_

"I thought she'd still be out at this point. Which reminds me-"

Savannah watched as the second stranger, a shorter man with thinning hair, pulled out a gun and pointed it right at her. The first man looked confused until the gun was shot, releasing three electric pulsers. They sent enough voltage through her body to make her turn visible again. She stood and tried to walk, but fell, her head making a lound _thunk_as it made contact with the ground.

_So that would explain the tingling from earlier, _she thought. She felt someone pick her up, recognizing him to be the first man, the _nice_one who didn't shoot her on a whim.

She thought she heard him shout something at the man with the gun, but her vision and hearing were both beginning to fade in and out, and held onto the man's shirt for security. She listened to them arguing as best she could before she blacked out once more.

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**Horrible chapter ending, I know, but you can kill me later for that. I mean seriously. I need to stop writing until 5AM. But at least now things are finally beginning to come together. And yes, the first third of this chapter was mere copy-and-paste in terms of dialogue, but I felt that what they were saying was important the way it was written originally. I won't do that much, if not any more. Please review and tell me what you think (just no flames)!**

**A/N: the wonderful L. L. Pottle pointed out that I said 40 years in the beginning, but then said 70 later on. Thanks again for pointing that out, dearie.**


	3. Author's note

**Hello there, dearies! That is, if anyone still cares about this story. It's been a 9-month hiatus, so let me explain you a thing.**

**The night of the 27th, my entire family for food poisoning. Yep. After that, I tried so hard to write chapter three, but after months of failed drafts, I discovered that I had no idea what I was doing or who this "Savannah" was. I was walking blindly into a story without any basis or research. **

**But I haven't given up on Obscure! I have big plans for it now, but plans that, unfortunately, take second priority to another story. I am in the process of writing a Thor fanfiction that shall face a tumblr audience before being published here. I can't work on Obscure until I've made a significant dent in the other story. So this hiatus is going to have been a little more than a year, come December. After that, I'm basically going to rewrite the two previous chapters and continue with the new plan.**

**Thanks to everyone who has followed, favorited, reviewed, or even read Obscure. You guys rock.**


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